Friday, October 19, 2018

Earlier this year we discussed how Apple was promoting new versions of macOS in the App Store on older Macs that were incompatible in the first place. Now with macOS Mojave released, Apple is still doing the same thing, and this time it’s even worse.

On my own 2008 iMac, I received a notification to “Upgrade to macOS Mojave,” complete with a short description of some of the big new features.

After opening up the Mac App Store, I clicked on the “Download” button to begin my upgrade, only to be greeted by an error message saying that “This version of macOS 10.14 cannot be installed on this computer.”

The error message was about as vague as it gets—nothing about my specific model being incompatible with macOS Mojave. Honestly, if I didn’t know that my 2008 iMac was incompatible with Mojave (as is probably the case with many older Mac owners), I would’ve easily taken this as a literal error message and assumed that there was a problem with my Mac.

This is pretty irresponsible of Apple. I understand that they want to promote the latest and greatest software in order to get customers to buy a newer Mac, but nowhere does it tell me specifically that my older Mac is incompatible with Mojave. They need to make that clear at the very least in a situation like this.